Bid Takers or Market Makers? The Effect of Auctioneers on Auction Outcomes

We benefited from the comments of seminar participants at UC Berkeley, Boston University, Colgate, Cornell, MIT, Queen's University, the University of Chicago, Toronto, Wisconsin-Madison, the Bank of Italy, and conference participants at the 2013 IZA Workshop on Behavioral Economics, the 2013 European Behavioral Economics Meeting, the 2013 NBER Summer Institute, the 2013 Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics, and the 2013 FTC Microeconomics Conference. Special thanks to Eric Budish and Tim Van Dam for helpful comments and suggestions; and to Barb Richards of the Canadian Auction College for allowing one of the authors to attend auctioneer college classes. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.